In a spinning mill, it is necessary to transport cops wound up by a spinning machine to a next step such as a winder. To this end, various automatic transporting systems have been proposed and put into practical use.
While such automatic transporting system may include such means as a belt conveyor or the like by means of which cops are transported at random, it may otherwise employ magazines for cops each having a suitable partition provided therein (hereinafter referred to as cop magazines). The latter means is very superior in that possible mechanical contact between cops is restricted to the minimum so that there is little possibility that yarn layers of the cops may be damaged (for example, Japanese Patent Publication No. 37-12733). Such cop magazine is preferably constituted such that partitions are formed in a vertical direction in such a manner as to push up cops in an order from the bottom portion to load the cops in position into the magazine, and also an automatic loading device for such cop magazine has been developed already (for example, Japanese Patent Laid-Open No. 49-26531).
Meanwhile, in a recent spinning mill, it is the actual state that production of many types in small quantities is inevitable. Accordingly, it is required for an automatic cop transporting system to provide exact indications of types of yarn of cops during transportation in order to prevent cops of different types of yarns from mixing with each other at a next step. To this end, it is a very popular practice that either cop magazines are differentiated in color for individual types of yarn of cops to be accommodated therein or different codes are set for different types of yarn and marked or written on cop magazines for facilitate use of particular cop magazines with a particular type of yarn.
With such conventional means, however, the cop magazines are used only with individually limited particular types of yarn. Consequently, such a cumbersome operation cannot be avoided that a cop magazine must be selected in conformity with a type of yarn to be spun on a spinning machine. In addition, there is another problem that, since a predetermined number of cop magazines are required for each type of yarns, a total number of required cop magazines is very great.